Say Good Bye to 3D Glasses with New Parallax Barrier Technology

Are you fed up wearing 3d glasses when watching 3D movies and playing games? For all those who say yes for above question here is a new technology where those four eye watching can be avoided. Nintendo and Toshiba are going make it alive with glasses-free 3-D to portable devices.Beautifully animated figures seem to be leaping out of the game player I’m holding. Planes and cars are swooping toward me so convincingly that I’m actually flinching. The graphics are detailed; the colors are natural. I’ve never had a better 3-D experience, and here’s the best part: This handheld, multidimensional marvel, a prototype from 3M, doesn’t require me to wear those clunky, chunky 3-D eyeglasses.
New glasses-free 3-D devices are about to hit the market, and their backers are hoping they’ll make 3d glasses as obsolete as Smell-O-Vision. These gadgets, described as “autostereo” to distinguish them from the kind requiring eyewear, will include not only game consoles like the one I’ve been playing with but also cameras, cell phones, and tablet computers. Among the first will be autostereo 3-D TVs, just now hitting stores in Japan, and Nintendo’s 3DS handheld games console, due for release worldwide early next year.

PRINCIPLE OF 3D DISPLAY:

To perceive three dimensions, a person’s eyes must see different, slightly unaligned images. In the real world, the spacing between the eyes makes that happen naturally. On a video screen, it’s not so simple; one display somehow has to present a different and separate view to each eye. Some systems handle this challenge by interspersing the left and right views; they’re called multiplexed. Others, called sequential, alternate left and right views. Whatever the approach, the displays then use optical or technological tricks to direct the correct view to the correct eye.
For example, the bulkiest 3d glasses used with currently available 3-D TVs are active-shutter glasses. They contain a set of miniature LCD panels that synchronize with the large LCD screen in the TV. When the main screen is showing an image destined for your right eye, a liquid-crystal shutter in the left lens of the glasses makes that lens opaque, and vice versa. This sequential system switches between images meant for each eye dozens of times a second, creating a smooth 3-D effect.

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Principle of Nintendo and Toshiba for glasses free 3-D technology is :

The Nintendo 3DS’s autostereo screen, made by Sharp, uses a multiplexed “parallax barrier” technology. This method lays a second layer of liquid crystals next to a traditional LCD and its backlight. This extra layer creates thin vertical strips that block some of the light and direct the remaining light alternately to the left and right eyes, creating a 3-D effect for a single viewer at a set distance, usually around 30 centimeters.

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Parallax barrier technology does have a few problems. Because the multiple layers of crystals prevent some light from reaching the user, getting to an acceptable level of brightness means cranking up the backlight, sucking up power and quickly draining batteries in portable devices. And because each eye sees only half a screen’s total pixels, the technique cuts the effective resolution in half. So manufacturers must choose between a display of standard resolution and brightness—and suffer dull, low-resolution 3-D graphics—or upgrade to a brighter, higher resolution screen that’s also pricey and power hungry.
Nintendo split the difference with its new console, bumping the brightness up but keeping the resolution relatively low. The 3DS has an 800- by 240-pixel screen that delivers 400- by 240-pixel views to each eye. While this is a step up from the 256-by-192 screen of its predecessor, the Nintendo DSi, it is just one-sixth the resolution found on the similarly sized Apple iPhone 4. Put simply, you wouldn’t want to watch a movie—or even view a photo slideshow—on the 3DS.
Parallax barrier displays also have sensitive geometries that deliver optimum 3-D effects only at a particular eye-separation distance—as close as possible to the statistical average of 65 millimeters. These displays are also tuned for a specific distance from screen to eye, with the 3-D effect fading if that distance is off by as little as 5 centimeters. This distance sensitivity is less of an issue for handheld devices than freestanding displays.
There-fore we can enjoy 3-D without glasses…….Technology Rocks……..